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Saints and Martyrs ˜ 279
black hands, and lots of mill laborers—mostly white folk. So from the north came
the looms, shuttles, and spools hungry to make cloth and ever higher profits.
My grandfather, an immigrant from Germany, came to Greenville, South
Carolina, at the turn of the century and began work in a cotton mill. Some ten
miles away in Easley, James Brown’s grandfather worked in a cotton mill. My
grandfather had a basic German education, married a landowner, invented a
machine to measure cloth as it was wound upon the bolt, and slowly and
painfully rose to bookkeeper. My mother remembers the fear and suffering the
family went through during World War I when people rode by their house and
yelled epithets at the German family. Some folks threw rocks, and occasionally
a brick went through the window.
James Brown’s grandfather did not advance through the mill structure. His
son accompanied his father to the houses, stores, churches, all provided by the
management. James Brown was born into the economic and cultural poverty of
the mill village in which both parents worked.
In 1940, at sixteen, James dropped out of the tenth grade to go to work in
the same mill in which his parents labored. Living in a very poor family put pressure
on James to become a wage earner. In 1943, James joined the Navy and
“learned what I wish I had not learned,” he told me, seeing death and destruction
in the South Pacific.
Before he left the Navy in 1946, James learned something else that he wishes
he had not learned. He learned to drink beer, wine, and whisky, and he was set
on a path of loneliness and destruction.
From the Pacific Ocean he returned to Easley, South Carolina—to the mill
village and mill work. Pay was very low; work was exceedingly hard; and hope
seemed especially dim in the dark and dusty mill.
How does one break out of a life of poverty and the dead-end existence of
a South Carolina textile-mill worker Ten years earlier, unions had been rejected.
What was the hope of higher wages Overtime work, perhaps. Many folk, men
and women, husband, wife, and children, would work and work and end the
month a little deeper in debt to the company store. If one cannot get out of a
situation, what about a drink of hard liquor That can soften the din of textile
machinery and the desolation of a life in poverty. Change, change, for a better
life, a new hope, for a new way of life, how do we accomplish it
One day in 1947, James Brown walked out of the textile mill, never to return.
He hoped, as we all hope, for a better life. James began to drive trucks and
buses. He traveled across the nation in tractor-trailers and drove Trailways buses
between New York City and Washington, D.C., and later over the two Carolinas.
There was hope on the horizon and new life in his heart. But there was also
the thirst that he had discovered in the war zone. A thirst for ease and comfort,